There is apparently no love lost between former “Meet the Press” moderator David Gregory and NBC.
Gregory exited the Sunday morning program in August 2014, now he is describing what went wrong in his new book “How’s Your Faith?: An Unlikely Spiritual Journey.”
“My relationship with ‘Meet the Press’ during that last year was like a marriage that you know is bad but you can’t leave,” Gregory says in an excerpt from the book, published Sunday by Salon.
“I was miserable, but I needed to be told the company didn’t support me before I could come to terms with the end,” he writes, before going on to reveal that he was never offered another position within the network.
“Although NBC backed me initially, the network decided late in the summer that it would not commit to me in the long term,” he says. “Could I have done something else at the network? In theory, yes. But as the damaging leaks kept coming, it became clear to me that they weren’t interested in that. It never came up as an option.”
These latest details about Gregory’s exit come four days after he criticized the way NBC handled the situation during a television interview.
“It was handled in a way that was unnecessary. NBC made a business decision which you can agree with or disagree with. It just didn’t need to be handled that way, and the process of it was difficult,” Gregory told “CBS This Morning” Wednesday.
Gregory announced the end of his six-year run as host of “Meet the Press” last summer on Twitter. He claims in his book that he was yanked off the air without being given a chance to say goodbye to viewers.
“NBC had decided it didn’t want to risk another ‘Ann Curry moment,’ which has become a byword in the TV business for an on-air embarrassment, after Curry’s long and tearful farewell from her job as ‘Today’ show cohost,” he writes. “Because of this ill-conceived concern, NBC decided not to let me have a final show… I was furious when I heard that. I felt like they were snuffing me out.”
The shakeup followed months of speculation that NBC would replace Gregory after its flagship Sunday news program slid to third place in the ratings behind CBS’ “Face The Nation” and ABC’s “This Week.” Gregory was immediately replaced by MSNBC’s Chuck Todd.
“How’s Your Faith?: An Unlikely Spiritual Journey” goes on sale Tuesday.